Amy Qualls is a quilter and Drupalist based in Portland, Oregon.

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love

Over years of texting and communicating through IM, you develop linguistic conventions that communicate emotion even through the impersonal medium of text. For me, an ever-present one has been the ellipsis; it denotes a moment without words. Often it's slackjawed astonishment. Sometimes it's laughter.

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early. I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats. Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home." He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

It's easy to become constricted by my own, self-imposed, rules. So far, every person I have written about here is someone who, at some point in the past or present, I could have called a lover. It's easy to get hung up in that and write a laundry list of lovers, a titillating story of people and clothing undone, but that does a disservice to everyone on the list.

I've written about you before, in entries both public and private. In the years before private entries I often avoided acknowledging you by name, allowing the unaware to draw the conclusion that I must actually be speaking of the person I married.

It was not always the case.

For this installment, instead of starting with new words, I will acknowledge some old ones that were about you all along:

[This entry is restricted, though I could have removed one sentence and made it public.]

If you knew I were writing this list, and I doubt that you do just yet, you would not expect to be on it. I don't think you've ever seen yourself as important. I've never known how to change that, but I hold to the belief that you will see it, given time and consistency on my part.